“Myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have long been forgotten.
The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason; to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.” –James Frazer, The Golden Bough
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not popular.” –Carl Jung
I live in Portland, Oregon. If you’ve watched any Portlandia, then you’ll already be aware that we have a fair number of people who lean to the left up here in my neck of the woods. (I love that show. Its creators manage to point out, in an amusing way, how much the far left is just like the far right. It’s always good to poke fun at oneself.)
As Jung was saying up there in the quote, we can’t get any wiser by throwing platitudes around, or by recycling every single plastic bag, or by being as “good” as we possibly can. That’s just not how human consciousness works.
We only get smarter in proportion to how much we can stand to examine the darkness in our own hearts. We’ll only get to where we can ‘see the light,’ by being willing to look into the darkness. Our own darkness. Not other people’s, or the other party’s, or those creeps who don’t recycle. But our own darkness.
“As long as we maintain that all the evil is out there, our ship, like Ahab’s, in on the course of destruction. When we acknowledge that the capacity for evil lives within us as well, we can make peace with our shadow, and our ship can sail safely.”–Andrew Bard Schmookler, analytical psychologist
We can be totally sincere and still do real damage to others — that’s what fanaticism is. Sincerity and integrity are not necessarily equals.
Tunnel vision is actually a complex. When we act out of a complex we think we already know what’s going on, so we react to whatever happens in the same old way. In fact, we can’t see anything else happening but what we already ‘think’ is happening, because we simply can’t pay attention to things which don’t fit into our complex. Tunnel vision produces distortions. It demands selective inattention.
And it tends to get hysterical when opposites or oppositions appear.
We don’t have to go around nurturing that terrible separateness and woundedness, overreacting to everything: opposite opinions, our past, our parents, or even our present.
We could choose to operate from an easier, more productive place where they allow at least two sides to every issue. We could make a game out of it. Pin the tail on the complex, maybe.
Will having Republicans in control of most branches of government (as they are now) prevent argument and deadlock? Not likely.
“In this world things can be settled with an either-or attitude only very rarely.” –Goethe
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” –Voltaire
One of the best short explanations of how the human shadow works comes from Robert Bly, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow:
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
Short and sweet.
I love it because the outer-world metaphor — that is exactly how light effects shadow in the physical world — synchs up so perfectly with the inner-world experience. The greatest evils are often performed by people who are perfectly sure of their righteousness. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
A nice, sweet, calm, intelligent person is just as busy as any of the rest of us building up a mean, rude, stupid, violent inner-personality (usually well hidden in that person’s shadow) who manages to get loose and pop out at weird times, in weird ways, and is capable of inflicting real damage to others. “I don’t know what came over me!” And no time of year stokes and provokes the stupid-shadow-self in each one of us more than Christmas time.
That’s because, on the surface, everything is sugar-coated in December. We glorify peace and love and kindness – there’s nothing the shadow hates worse – in songs and cards and decorations and syrupy TV shows, while using cut-throat competition, below-living wages, environmental degradation, and political power plays to get things done.
To bring it right down to the minute, try listening to what runs through your head for an hour or two during the Christmas season. Is it peaceful? Is it full of good will toward men? Not so much. Hhmph. Who knows if ‘peace on earth’ or ‘good will toward men’ is even possible? Looking at history or current events, you’d have to say those are strange concepts for our particular species to be singing about.
And most of our family situations are so at odds with the sweetness of commercial Christmas, too. It’s destabilizing. We forget that neither Norman Rockwell’s or Currier & Ives’ paintings were pictures of real life.
So before we go any further let’s stop and remind ourselves that Christmas is not going to come off flawlessly this year. That we will not get everything we wanted. That we’re liable to stress ourselves out buying things we know we can’t afford, or trying to find time to make cookies we shouldn’t actually eat. That none of our relatives will be as likable as Jimmy Stewart or Donna Reed.
Hell! Even Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed weren’t that nice. They were playing characters in a movie. Entitled: “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Sheesh.
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Nobody qualifies as a reliable narrator. Not when they’re telling their own story. We all have vast egos to protect, and even vaster shadows to protect them with. All any of us can do is try to be a reliable narrator.
When I’m asked by someone new about my own personal history (careers, moves, marriages, divorces), I find I have to really slow down and search my heart to keep from dropping into the “good guy, bad guy” mode as soon as I open my mouth. And probably still do so even when I’m trying not to.
We all want to be the hero of our own story, no doubt about it.
But even more than that, we want for someone else to be the villain.
This is from the introduction to The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong, published in 2009:
“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythos of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma on “faith” were their most important activity.
This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as “creation science” that regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.” –Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. XV in hard back edition
And of course, we now have Islamic “believers” on the other side of the world bombing and beheading those who disagree with their beliefs. Ouch.
During the recent “Cosmos” series on TV, the narrator pointed out that we are only 400 years away from the first time anyone looked at the stars through a telescope. 400 years. That is no time, evolutionarily speaking, since everyone thought that the world was flat and that a God who lived up in the sky would send them to either heaven or hell when they died (or reincarnate them after death). It’s certainly (and obviously) not enough time for most people on the planet to adapt their thinkings and imaginings to a universe far more vast, intricate and impersonal than their elders could have ever imagined.
Thus we all find ourselves caught in the pincers of a dying scorpion: last-gasp, backward-yearning, earth-centric thinking. And the clearer it becomes that its beliefs are not based on reality, the more violently will this dying scorpion thrash around. Ouch.
Never before have so many been on anti-depressants and other mind altering drugs, and never before have so many been depressed and/or acted crazier.
Maybe it’s time to realize that mood altering drugs are just another category of products that are not being pushed onto us ‘for our own good,’ as they always say, but for the benefit of some very big corporations’ very voluminous bottom lines.
Did any of the numerous drugs he took during his lifetime help Robin Williams? or Philip Seymour Hoffman?
Watch THX, George Lucas’ first movie.
We don’t need to deaden ourselves to what’s happening in our world.
We need to wake up and change our world before it’s too late.
We never know what sorrows and demons live behind another person’s persona.
I try not to judge. Just to grieve.
What a brightly burning light Robin Williams had! Which means he had just as great a darkness within.
And didn’t know how to reconcile the two.
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them–or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn… If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life.” –from Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
“Lydgate did things in an episodic way, much as he gave orders to his tailor for every requisite of perfect dress, without any notion of being extravagant… it had never occurred to him that he should live in any other way than what he would have called an ordinary way… he walked by hereditary habit… –from Middlemarch, by George Eliot